Shaking the Bough: Tales from the DC Wasteland
by Faeline
Summary: It all began with a flight from the Vault and a desperate search for her father. Where it will end, she could never predict. A collection of linked tales chronicling the adventures of the Lone Wanderer. Tale 3: Faith, trying to find her father, makes a deal with Moriarty: an errand for information on James' whereabouts. What happens when that deal falls through?
1. Keep Calm and Carry On

**AN:** This will be a series of short tales, vignettes, and the occasional flash fiction chronicling the adventures of the Lone Wanderer and the goings on of the Capital Wasteland.

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><p><strong><em><strong>Keep Calm and Carry On<strong>_**

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><p><strong><em>Look around you find the ground<br>Is not so far from where you are  
>But don´t be too wise<br>For down below they never grow  
>They're always tired and charms are hired<br>From out of their eyes  
>Never surprise.<em>**

**– Nick Drake, "Things Behind the Sun"**

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><p>Faith imagined this was what the end of the world must have been like.<p>

Hot stinging air rolled over her skin and light, brighter than anything she'd ever seen in the Vault, blotted out the world. Even when she closed her eyes at the pain, the white seared through her lids.

Stumbling, she brought one hand up to shade her closed eyes and smeared something thick and wet and warm across her temple. The smell of gun oil mingled with copper and salt, invaded her nose, settled on the back of her tongue and she gagged.

She was burning from the inside out, stomach twisting. Bile scorched her throat and she fell, hard, to her knees and vomited until dry heaves left her shaking and weak.

Sinking back on her heels, she wiped her mouth with her arm. Her skin was still hot but the light was no longer pulsing against her eyes and, slowly, she opened them.

A tear slipped down her face, followed by another. She sniffed, slapped them away. They were the after effects of light blindness. That was all.

They had nothing to do with the sight of this place stretched out before her. This ripped up and jagged landscape where spires of wood and steel rose out of the ground like strange growths; where small dust devils formed up and down a broken road, spinning half-heartedly before dissipating.

This place with no sound.

No movement.

No trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow.

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><p><strong># # #<strong>

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><p>She might very well have sat there on her heels, staring out past the remnants of the pre-war world, waiting for something to happen—for the night to fall and bring out whatever creatures hunted in the dark; for the sun to scorch the flesh from her bones and leave nothing but a bleached skeleton—but for one thing.<p>

Since the appearance of Amata's face over her bed this morning, Faith's mind had been flashing little snippets from her life. A lot like an old movie reel—her 10th birthday party, playing sick from Mr. Brotch's class, fighting with Butch—and now, it froze on the broad face of Wally Mack.

Wally Mack who, several weeks ago had pinned her to the wall down near the Reactor Core. Who'd broken the zipper on her vault suit and shoved his hands down her pants and expected her to go along with. Not to scream. Not to fight.

If she had, that would have been it. She'd have been Mrs. Wally Mack just as soon as he'd gotten word out to his daddy and the Overseer.

_And_, Faith thought, _Mrs. Wally Mack wouldn't have woken up in the early hours of this morning to sirens and shouts and guards trying to kill her because her dad had some kind of fucked up idea to escape the vault. _

_Mrs. Wally Mack wouldn't be in this situation._

_Maybe…._

_But_, Mrs. Wally Mack would wake up every morning to see that smug, snub nosed visage as he rolled on top of her to do his civic duty.

It had been_ that_ thought that had given her the courage to drag her nails down Wally's face, to thrust out with the flat of her palm—just like Officer Gomez had shown her—when he jerked away from the pain. To drive her foot into his crotch while he cradled his broken nose.

And it's those thoughts she uses to pull herself to her feet and move towards the sign advertising a "Scenic Overlook."

The overlook is scenic. Spread before it is a world torn apart. Grizzled. Decayed.

But there's something about it—from the skeletal structures of what looks like a burnt out town to that hulk of twisted metal rising in the distance—that makes her tingle, from head to toe, as if Nuka cola was fizzing in her veins.

That's a feeling she so rarely got in the Vault that she can identify the first and last time she felt it: when her dad finally let her sew sutures on Stanley (with the man's permission, of course; he was always such a good sport…).

It's the feeling of new opportunity.

And even the acidic shuddering of her stomach as she eyed the path she would walk, and the shaking of her hands as she loaded her only other magazine into the 10mm, couldn't stamp down that feeling. Or prevent the surge of light headed excitement at the realization that she was fully free to seek it.


	2. Strange Elations

**AN:** A little Gob perspective on first meetings.

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><p><em><strong>And there's a strange elation in your subtle assassination<br>I thought I saw a glimmer of hope,  
>I thought I saw a glimmer of hope. <strong>_

**~ Lily Holbrook, "Better Left Unsaid"**

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><p>Gob was used to ridicule. Cruel names. Crueler stares.<p>

After so many years, you either grew a thicker skin—there was a saying that never failed to amuse him—or you went off the deep end and took as many staring, epithet snarling Smoothskins with you as you could.

He'd like to think he'd "grown a thicker skin" over the last thirty years, able to stand whatever got his thrown his way.

And then she walked into Moriarty's.

Fresh out of the Vault she was. No doubt about it. Even if he hadn't already seen one vault dweller today, and even if she hadn't been wearing the jumpsuit, he'd have known it. Beneath the spatter of blood and the fresh wasteland dirt on her cheeks, she was pale and perfect, untouched by the harsh winds and the scorching sun.

Her hands, he saw as she laid them on the bar, were well cared for; fingernails smoothed and buffed, skin soft. And—just for a second, really, less than the space of his heart beat—he wondered what it'd be like to touch her.

When he finally met her eyes, the look she gave him struck something in the back of his throat and his "What do you want?" came out gruffer than he'd expected.

She blinked, opened her mouth and stuttered, "…look—looking for my father. Have you seen him?"

"Think he passed through here…," he muttered. Of course, her father had definitely passed through; you didn't randomly get two vaulties in one day.

"Where is he?"

Gob hauled another glass toward him, opened his mouth, closed it, and glared at a smudge on the side that looked an awful lot like Moriarty's fist coming at him. "Look, kid. I'd like to help. Really. But Mr. Moriarty's in charge around here. You need to talk to him. He's in back taking care of some business." He nodded at the tables in the front of the room. "You can wait."

Nodding, she slid onto a bar stool. Stared at him.

"What's the matter," he said, setting the newly polished glass down, "ain't you ever seen a Ghoul before?"

_Of course she hasn't, you idiot. _

"A ghoul?" she frowned. "Is…that what you are? How did—"

"Radiation. Lots of it. And then time. All the time in the world for things to start falling apart."

He dropped his rag on the bar, rested his elbows on top of it.

"Oh," she said, biting the inside of her cheek. She was looking closely now. Following the line of exposed muscle down his face and neck, over his arm.

That, he expected.

What he did not expect was for her to reach out and lay one of those fine, soft fingers on his wrist, at the edge of torn, tattered skin and smooth muscle. And he shuddered under her touch.

"Do—does it hurt?"

_Ohh. And fuck him. She sounded genuinely concerned. _

He swallowed. Opened eyes he didn't remember closing.

"Just my pride." Shifting uncomfortably, he moved closer to the bar to keep everything from the waist down out of sight.

_Among other things._


	3. Show Me Where It Hurts (Part 1)

**Authors Notes:** This will have several parts to it. When they'll all be posted, I don't know. You can also find this posted over on my Archive of Our Own account. It's a little neater formatting and a little easier to follow. Check my profile for the link.

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><p>Stand out on the edge of the earth<br>Dive into the center of fate  
>Walk right in the sight of a gun<br>Look into the new future's face

~ "Edge of the Earth" – 30 Seconds to Mars

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><p>The little house just north of Megaton had looked almost quaint from the outside, despite the dilapidated roof and crumbling shutters. Inside, it was, Faith thought, just like everything else in this wasteland.<p>

The woman's body—Silver, Faith figured, by the pale blond color of her hair—lay crumpled at the foot of the bed, a puppet whose strings had been cut. One of her hands curled loosely around the butt of a revolver. The other grasped at the ragged hole in the middle of her belly.

The sour tang of blood and cigarette smoke combined with the death room odor of urine and feces and flooded across the back of Faith's tongue, stung her eyes. She stumbled away from the body, crashing into a wooden armoire. Sinking to her haunches amid a shower of empty glass bottles, she covered her mouth with her hand and tried to swallow down the burn in her throat.

_She shouldn't be here. What the hell did she think she was doing here?_

And then that bar owner's voice, with its rolling accent, slid through her head, insidious as a brain tumor. _Take care of Silver, get me my caps, and I'll tell you where your da's gone. Simple as that. And if you don't? Well…it's a mighty big Wasteland to be searchin' through_.

Faith shook her head. Took a shallow breath. She could do this. It was just a dead body. She'd seen dead bodies before.

E_ven caused a few of them_, whispered a voice in the back of her head.

With a quickly muttered apology, she went for the pockets of once-Silver's softly tattered pants.

No caps.

She turned to the footlocker, the dresser, the armoire and found nothing but whiskey bottles, inhalers, and a pack of bobby-pins.

"Damn it!" she hissed, kicking at an empty bottle. It slid into the kitchen crashed into the counter and shattered. The shards caught the last bit of light seeping through the boarded up window and sparkled quite prettily.

Until a shadow fell across them.

Through the spaces on the boarded up window, Faith watched, stuck to the spot, as the shadow moved past the window.

Voices rumbled on the other side of the wall, indistinct. Her eyes went to the kitchen door. The handle rattled. The door swung inward, just as a gravelly voice said: "Can't believe you didn't fuckin' loot the whole fuckin' place while you was here—Hey!"

A bullet screamed by her head and Faith yelped, ducked, scrambled for the gun on her hip.

Putting on a burst of speed, she headed for the Red Rocket, crouched behind one of its legs. Bullets dinged off the metal. Too close. A scratchy, high pitched voice screamed things that she couldn't understand.

Time seemed to slow as the toe of a boot came into view and Faith raised her eyes, raised her gun.

The woman pointed her shotgun at Faith's head and smiled—a mirror image of once-Silver's death grimace—even as Faith squeezed the trigger on her own gun and watched the side of the woman's neck explode.

The woman collapsed to her knees, dropping the shot gun. Her wildly jerking hands tried to stem the blood pouring from the torn carotid. She opened her mouth, gurgled something unintelligible. Warm droplets of bloody spittle hit Faith's cheeks, her nose and she cried out, jerking back, as the woman fell to the ground.

On the periphery of her vision, Faith could see the other one—a man, dressed in the same pieced together armor—running for her, firing his pistol into the air as if he were trying to scare off a wild animal.

And like a wild animal, she turned and fled, head reeling.

She fell several times, picked herself up and kept pushing forward until she saw the metal spires of Megaton.

But the man was still behind her.

Heat exploded across the side of her head. She stumbled again, fell into the dirt.

He was close enough she could hear the raggedness of his breath, feel him pointing the barrel of his gun at the back of her head and she squeezed her eyes closed, preparing for the bullet that would tear through her skull.

The shot rang out.

She opened her eyes, twisted her body, saw the man above her stumble back—an absurdly neat hole in his temple—fall and roll down the hill.

Her breath left her all at once and she collapsed on her back.

Above her, the darkening sky was rippling with stars and one of them was yelling.

"Simms! Shit goin' down! Get the doc!"

**#~#~#**

_Freddie liked it when she used her mouth on him. And, after a bit of coaxing, he'd been more than willing to return the favor._

_However, after getting caught once by Mr. Brotch who'd been polite and politic enough to ignore their half undone clothes as he sent them on their way, and nearly caught a week later by Allen Mack—who would have hauled them straight to the Overseer for marriage rites—they'd had to find a better place to meet than the storage room._

_Down in the bowels of the vault, in a little used area, where no one seemed to venture, inside a room that Faith had broken several bobby-pins to get into, on top of a musty old mattress that had probably been there for a hundred years, they had spent many stolen hours mapping each others bodies._

_Learning the taste of sweat and blood, come and tears._

_The night she'd pulled him onto her, into her—so ready to cast off the label of child—it had hurt. And she'd clung to his back as the burn sang through her, as he kissed the tears sliding from the sides of her eyes._

_"It always hurts," he'd whispered later, when they lay tangled together, jumpsuits draped over them like blankets._

_"What?"_

_"New experiences," he said, mouth against hers. "It's how we know we're learning. And growing."_

_"What if…. I don't know if I can take it," she confessed._

_He nuzzled her cheek, pushed his nose against the curve of her neck, raised his lips to the shell of her ear—"You are the strongest person I know"—and bit down_.

She screamed.

"_Calm down_! You wanna wake the whole town?"

Faith jerked away from the man gripping her arm, put her back to the wall and realized she was sitting up in a bed in a room that smelled of blood and antiseptic. "Where am I? Who are you?"

"Megaton. My clinic. Doc Church."

She blinked at him and he sighed, scowling. "Simms dragged your ass in here. You jarred your ankle good and took a bullet graze to the ear. You're lucky Stockholm's a crack shot, otherwise you'd be sporting an even bigger hole in your head."

"Stockholm?" she said, wincing as she brushed the bandage that held her right ear to her head, then yelping when Church smacked her hand away.

"The guard at the town entrance and don't mess with that. Leave the bandage on until it scabs, unless you want to get an infection. In which case, don't expect me to treat it."

She stared at him for a heartbeat. The man had a face that looked like it would split in two if he tried to smile.

"You," she said, suddenly very tired and annoyed and sick to death of just about everybody she's met in the day she's been out of the vault, "have the bedside manner of a mortician."

"I've been told. Now get dressed and get out of my clinic."

**#~#~#**

"Ah, so there's the wee vault girl." The bar owner, Moriarty, stepped away from the shelves at the rear of the bar, tapping his pencil against the clipboard in his hands and looked her over, slowly, head to toe and back again. "Ye get into a scrape, vault girl?"

"Was more than a scrape…" she muttered, limping toward the end of the bar and sliding onto a stool. She met Moriarty's eyes, looked away. It was hard to hold his gaze. She examined the half full glass of piss yellow liquid Gob sat in front of a man at the other end, caught Gob's eye for a moment. The ghoul gave a sympathetic tilt of his head before scurrying back to his rounds. "Somebody," Faith said, "already…took care of Silver."

"One good turn," Moriarty said. "But that does present us with a problem, doesn't it? 'Cause I'm bettin' whoever sent Silver to that great big whorin' ground in the sky also made off with the caps you were supposed to deliver."

Faith bit the inside of her cheek, stared at a shiny, weathered spot on the wood in front of her.

She heard Moriarty sigh—a soft hum of breath—and he came around the bar, pulled himself up onto the stool next to her.

A tumbler of whiskey appeared at her wrist.

"Drink that, girl," Moriarty said, tossing back his own whiskey.

She stared at it for a moment, shrugged and threw it back, just like she had the night she and Butch got into a contest of dares. It burned all the way down and she closed her eyes, savoring the feeling, gave a little shudder.

When she opened her eyes, Moriarty was staring at her, head every-so-slightly cocked. The look on his face was familiar. A distant cousin to the half rabid look she used to see on Wally Mack's face; less malice, more hunger.

It made something low in her belly tighten, sent a rush of warmth up toward her face.

She looked away, only glancing at him when he filled her glass a second time; she enjoyed the milder rush of heat, the feel of her muscles relaxing.

Warm breath stirred her hair. He was closer now, violating her space. Something tickled against the arm she rested on the bar and she looked down, saw the very tip of his forefinger trace slowly over the little jutting bone of her wrist.

"While I'm disappointed in the loss of the caps," he said, voice low and deeper than before, "there may be some other agreement that you and I can come to. What do you say?"

His words were smooth, intrusive, revolting.

And she considered them.

For a half second longer than she should have.

Then she threw back the third shot he'd poured into her glass, grimacing as it burned her throat, then looked Moriarty in the eye, rose and walked out of the bar.

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><p>tbc...<p> 


End file.
